Man sues blog­ger for in­sult­ing all ofHe­nan

A res­i­dent of He­nan prov­ince is su­ing a mi­croblog­ger for crit­i­ciz­ing all He­nan peo­ple. The law­suit was ac­cepted by the Zhengzhou Jin­shui District Peo­ple’s Court in Zhengzhou, He­nan prov­ince onWed­nes­day.

Hu Wei, the mi­cro-blog­ger, who has 46,000 on­line fans, reg­is­tered on Sina Weibo in 2012.

A screen shot showed a post­ing on Aug 14, say­ing that “Ma Rong, Wang’s wife, has no face, like all He­nan peo­ple”.

The law­suit was filed by Jing Chang­shui, 46, who said he had lived and worked in He­nan for nearly 30 years and knows the kind of peo­ple they are. He said Hu’s abuse dated at least to April, and claimed the blog­ger had sug­gested there were no good He­nan peo­ple, which se­ri­ously dam­agedHe­nan’s rep­u­ta­tion.

“Cen­tral China’s He­nan prov­ince has a long his­tory, and such in­sults deeply harm the im­age of He­nan, so I chose to deal with it us­ing le­gal weapons,” Jing said.

Jing sub­mit­ted his law­suit as “pub­lic interest lit­i­ga­tion” on Aug 31. De­fen­dants in­clude Hu and Sina Weibo. He de­manded an apol­ogy from Hu for the al­leged in­sults. He also asked for dele­tion of ma­te­rial deemed of­fen­sive and said Hu must stop mak­ing in­sult­ing re­marks about He­nan peo­ple.

What’s more, he wanted the de­fen­dant to make a pub­lic apol­ogy through the me­dia, and pay 1,000 yuan ($150) as com­pen­sa­tion for men­tal in­jury.